Happy New Year!
I’ve had the last two weeks off from work and have enjoyed spending time with my wife and daughter as well as just relaxing around the house. We had a very interesting weather pattern here leading up to the new year so I also shoveled more snow than I ever have in my life. Christmas was low key and I think we did a pretty good job of keeping the overall spending down. Our family does a gift exchange each year (we draw names out of a hat and we buy one present for the name we draw) and we all agreed to lower the cost of gifts to $50 from $75. This saved our house $50 compared to last year. We also set a lower limit for gifts for our nieces and nephews which helped save a bit as well.
Energy costs have been much higher this winter because we’ve had so much cold weather. We received a letter from our power company comparing our energy use to others with similar size houses near us and we were much more efficient than even the “efficient” users. I think this probably has to do with the fact that we keep our thermostat lower, only wash full loads in the laundry, use compact fluorescent bulbs in most of the house and also spend some weekends at our lake house. Even with all of our energy efficient behavior our gas/power bill was almost $250 last month. OUCH. I normally budget for about $125 or so.
Anyway, that’s a long drawn out way to get to the main subject of this post. Our home refinance is going along nicely and we should close in the next couple weeks. We were pleasantly surprised to find out our appraisal came in at $416,000. I was thinking we’d be lucky if it came in at $375,000. Needless to say, we’re fine with that figure. Either way, we still have a lot of equity in it. I’m really looking forward to lowering our mortage rate to 4.875% for a 30 year fixed loan. We’ll be sending in additional money each month towards the principal to pay the loan off sooner than that. I’d still like to have the house paid off before our daughter gets to college.
So, that’s what’s happening at our house. We are both still employed and I hope to keep it that way through 2009. My company is going to announce layoffs in their Information Technology division (where I work) at the end of this month but I’ve already been told by my boss that I should be okay. Regardless it’s still stressful to be in an environment where people are losing their jobs. I feel so sorry for the people that are losing their jobs in this horrible economy. It’s very likely that, no matter how great they are, it will still be an uphill struggle to find new employment for awhile. Hopefully many of these people have been building emergency funds, although statistically, that probably isn’t likely. With all I hear about the debt levels that many people have, it’s hard to believe they’ve got a ton of cash reserves for emergencies.
I’ve been spending a little bit of time in my financial spreadsheets playing with numbers lately. By my calculations, once the refinance is done, we should have 51% of our after tax income left each month after all of our bills (power, food, mortgage, utilities etc) are paid. That number would be much higher if we weren’t putting so much away in our 401K accounts, but this is the best time for maxing out our investments so we won’t be changing that at all.